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Cave with Pool

The only real variation that I made from Torstan's original tutorial was that I used a water feature rather than lava.

I love how the shadows work with this design and plan on using it for my future work. The water turned out fairly well using the marble as an overlay with some highlights and shadows to show the depths.

Let me know what ya think. I'm wanting to add more details to the cave system (like a stream flowing from one chamber to the other) or a deep chasm or pit in one of the side-chambers but still working on how to do that.

Well I can't see torsten's pit but his map is really really nice - you are right to use it for inspiration. The blue of his water really stands out - perhaps you might consider using his more muted colour scheme for your water too? Your map is very nice by the way.

Oh - he didn't have a pit in the map that he posted but he used contour lines to show how the water had dug into the rocky floor of the cave. I thought that I could use the same principle to try and show depth for the pit.

The problem with your pit is that it looks too similar to your cave walls, so the casual viewer will not notice that there is a pit there at all and instead see a section of rock. You'll need to find a way to differentiate pit from rock.

OK, so I blurred the outline of the pit and then added a layer over it of the shade of the first 'ring' inside the pit to help the two blend together. Hopefully this will flip the viewer's perception that it is not another wall but a different feature.

So going along the lines of 'Elements' that you can add to a typical, cavernous encounter I started wondering what I could toss into these maps to make them interesting.

So I started a list:

Lava Flow (from Torstan's original tutorial)
Water (pool of some kind)
Pit / Chasm
Slime (either large sections of it covering the tunnels or a chamber.
Moss / Lichen (something green and carpet-y that they will have to walk through)
Webs (though I have almost no idea how to simulate this for a cave floor)
...